Game Dev Days Graz 2017

#GDDG17

Game Dev Days Graz is a community event for everyone who is interested in game development: connecting industry, indies, academia, research.

The event is free to attend, but the number of places is limited and advance registration is required. Friday features a public VR art exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz. Saturday is reserved for panels, talks, and games. Sunday we will organize an optional social event.

We want your VR art! Please submit your creations, creative installations and art projects created with VR. These will be showcased in a public exhibition at
Kunsthaus Graz on September 1, 2017 as part of the VR Playful Art Event @ Game Dev Days 2017.

Playing with Cubes Again: The Making of Q.U.B.E. 2

Dan is the Managing Director at Toxic Games. Securing investment from Indie Fund straight out of University, Dan went on to create the award-winning indie game, Q.U.B.E., and was able to set up a full-time game studio. Six years on he has produced more games including multi-award winning, Hue and the upcoming, Q.U.B.E. 2. Dan regularly attends and speaks at events around the globe and thrives on sharing knowledge, expertise and learning of new ways to do business in the ever-changing games industry.

Speakers

Spine is the market leader in dedicated 2D skeletal animation middleware, used by hobbyist and the biggest names in gaming alike. In this whirlwind tour, we'll have a look at its history including 2 successful Kickstarter campaigns, technical challenges encountered during the integration with various game engines, community management and support workflows, as well as tales from the business side. Learn how successful middleware sausage is made! Erika is an Illustrator, animator and rigger devoted to 2D. She's been a Spine fangirl for a long time and recently joined the Esoteric Software team. She's also been freelancing in the Italian indie video game scene, and participated in game jams.

Bongfish took over the F2P mobile game Smurfs' Village in 2016. At that time the game was already on the market for 6 years and had a decent player base. It was a risky adventure to take over such a big title, to move the back-end, start working on a huge unknown and messy code base and to learn about development cycles at the same time.
After managing the take over from the technical side we had a lot of questions: Who are our players? How to turn a F2P game into cash? What are live-operations? What kind of development team do we need and what are the roles? What do players want? In which direction should the game head in the future?
The talk will give a short overview about how we survived and what we’ve learned so far.
Daniela Hauswirth is currently in charge of the development team at Bongfish for the popular mobile game "Smurfs' Village".

Together with Gregor Eigner from Mi'pu'mi Games, Stefan Srb will talk about The Lion's Song Post Mortem, giving an honest insight into the development cycle, highlighting successes, positive and negative surprises as well as failures during the making of "The Lion's Song". How will the development and self-publishing of "The Lion's Song" influence Mipumi as a company and Mipumi's future original IPs? Will there be a future to "The Lion's Song"?
Stefan Srb is a Viennese game developer and pixel artist. By day he is a professional game designer at Mi'pu'mi Games whose passion for making games drives him to make even more games at night. Making games since 2011, he is regularly participating in game jams such as Ludum Dare. He is very active in the Viennese game scene with regular talks at e.g. Game Dev MeetUps.

In July 2017, we released all episodes of "The Lion's Song" for PC, iOS and Android, bringing this four-episode adventure game to an end. Join us as we give an honest insight into the development cycle, highlighting successes, positive and negative surprises as well as failures during the making of "The Lion's Song".
How will the development and self-publishing of "The Lion's Song" influence Mipumi as a company and Mipumi's future original IPs? Will there be a future to "The Lion's Song"? Find out in our session! Gregor Eigner is CEO and founder of Mipumi Games. In the last 8 years the company grew to 25+ employees. Gregor studied law and economics and has 15 years of project management experience. Furthermore, Gregor teaches law and production for game developers in Austria and publicly speaks from time to time.

'Old Man's Journey' is an Apple Design Award winning puzzle adventure featuring an absorbing, emotional narrative - the life story of an old man uncovered through beautiful vignettes of his memories.
Clemens will talk about the framework of constraints that was set up to inform the art direction, as well as the inspirations and the process behind the visuals of Old Man's Journey. He will also touch on more technical subjects such as how we set up the art pipeline in Unity, performance pitfalls and other lessons learned from the project. Clemens Scott is a co-founder, lead artist and creative director of the Vienna based game development studio hub Broken Rules.

Dear Unity game dev dinosaurs: Let's catch up on 10 years of C# improvements

Unity 2017 is upon us and with it we are getting a long overdue upgrade to a newer version of the Mono runtime. In this lightning talk we will look at what language and framework features the rest of the C# world has had for years and how it might be the right time to bring your code out of the stone ages. Covering topics from 'Why the dynamic language runtime is nothing to be afraid (or dogmatic) about' to 'Why are you still not using .NET 3.5 features like LINQ and anonymous types?', this talk aims to cover a lot of C# ground with concrete examples and high level discussions, from 101 to expert level. Patrick is the Co-Founder and Director at Greenheart Games, makers of Game Dev Tycoon. He is currently working on his second game: Tavern Keeper - A fantasy tavern simulator.

In early 2015 Sproing started working on a mobile game based on the legendary rock band Kiss. In late 2017, after various publisher and team changes, as well as an insolvency, it will finally be released, fingers crossed. This is the whole story so far.
Dietmar is Head of Programming at Austria's leading game studio, Sproing Interactive Media GmbH.
He looks back on a long and interesting programming career after more than a decade in the games industry. He has contributed greatly to Sproing's multi-platform development pipeline and has successfully worked as a lead programmer on projects spanning several different companies, countries, cultures, timezones and platforms.

The every days challenge of free-to-play and online-game studios: playing with the social live and the moods of players. Did you ever notice, how easy it is to spoil your players day with wrong decisions? Ronald has been working in the game dev industry since about 20 years - as founder of Crafty Studios in 2006, supporter and interim manager for game and its orientated companies.

How to build a supportive community around your game

Countless games are created every day by independent game developers. Most of them will fade and be forgotten, not due to a lack of quality but a lack of visibility. Building a community around your game in development is an excellent way to connect with people early on. Having a loyal fan base is not only beneficial for the financial success of the game, but provides the developer with constant feedback and can serve as a great motivator to push through the tough times of development. This talk in based upon the experience I made with our game "Niche - a genetics survival game". Topics include exhibitions, crowdfunding, indiedev collectives and Steam Early Access.

Philomena Schwab is a game designer from Zurich, Switzerland. Recently she co-founded her own game studio Stray Fawn Studio, which is currently developing the desktop games Niche - a genetics survival game and Nimbatus - The Space Drone Constructor. Philomena wrote her master thesis about "Community building for indie game developers" and founded the nature gamedev collective Playful Oasis. As a chair member of the Swiss Game Developers association she helps her local game industry grow.

Lightning Talks, talks, talks!

For many people applying for a job is a scary and tricky thing.
What does the company expect? What should I put into my portfolio? How do you write an application letter? And what is relevant and what not?
This talk provides you with a step-by-step guideline on how to prepare properly before you apply for a job. It helps you to find your strengths and weaknesses and teaches you to use the latter to your advantage. You will get insight into recruitment processes and assessment strategies, learn how to write application letters and how to survive job interviews.

The talk will be about the importance of body similiarity in virtual environments and its impact on immersion. The posibility to customize your playable avatar or to use the actual player of the body should always be considered. A short overview of how the actual body of players have been used in kinect games in the past will be given and how this could be translated to the future of VR. The talks aims to inspire the audience to see the virtual body as more than just a tool to press hotspots but as an interactive shape thats worth exploring.
Wolfgang Tschauko studied Media Technology and Design at FH Hagenberg and Interaction Design at FH Joanneum.

This talk explores the merits and horrors of being a solo developer, the temptation of making games without stories and the best game of 2017. Josh has published a bunch of small games as "Stuffed Wombat" on the internet and is making one game per month in 2017.

At Game Dev Days Graz 2016 Alexander's stupidity resulted in some painful experiences. In this talk he is going to explain, how he used these events as inspiration and motivation to create personal games about his life.
Alexander Grenus works as game designer at stillalive studios. He worked on the award winning action-adventure Son of Nor and Bus Simulator 16. He released his first game in 2007 and worked as an artist for architecture and product visualization, before he joined stillalive studios in 2012.

Attendees shall leave with a better understanding of the relation shared between both industries; historically, socially and pragmatically. There is much that can be learned from previous pioneering industries and their present recessions serve as prophecies of our own possible future.
Alain is a freelance Game Designer at A-line Games. He has a strong background in the film industry and has even written a book on the subject, "The Film Textbook".
Under his belt are many other board games and mobile games. Lately, he was guest speaker at GamiLearn'17 and will also talk this June at Taipei Game Dev Forum.

Chatbots in messenger apps are a buzzword, but the format hasn't yet reached its creative maturity. Sr&dstrok;an Laterza will share his experience in developing chatbots and show what he discovered exploring the creative potential of the medium. He will present his work-in-progress gamified chatbot Bok Bot which allows the visitors of Zagreb to explore the city, while chatting with intriguing historical figures that once lived in the city.
Sr&dstrok;an Laterza is an independent creative consultant, writer, screenwriter and game designer. He is currently focused on exploring the potentials of messenger chatbots by creating and testing prototypes of innovative bots. He collaborates with the leading regional IT companies, advertising agencies and startups.

This talk will present a number of rules and guidelines that you should have in mind when creating immersive VR applications - from the subjects of 3D and 2D objects up to sound, environments and user interfaces. These basic rules will enable you to make the user's experience the most comfortable and comprehensible. Lorenz Jäger is working as a project assistant, researcher and software engineer at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision (ICG) at TU Graz. His research interests lie both in Computer Vision as well as Graphics with a focus on real-time applications and games.

Designing games for live events, where people are waiting in long lines to play the game poses several challenges. The game should not only entertain the actual player, but interacting with it should also engage passers-by to stop, watch, and play as well. Additionally, it is both crucial to entertain people waiting in the line and to give them a first learning experience how to play the game until it is their turn to play.
In this talk Rainer will introduce and discuss guidelines how to design and produce such games, with focus on engaging players with interesting game interfaces and controls, and entertaining and attracting visitors by implementing fun competitive elements.
After finishing his studies in telematics and network engineering Rainer co-founded the Austrian-based game studio Rarebyte in 2006. Since then he has worked as producer, programmer, and designer on more than 25 titles covering all major platforms.

When the first mobile phones capable of running games hit the market also the first download portals appeared in the early 2000's. With the huge success of Apple and Google app stores for smartphone these initial telecom stores disappeared - or so it seems. However, there are still (and yet again) dozens of such "non app stores" or portals, mainly in emerging markets where the large app stores are barely used or accessible. There is a whole parallel universe - outside of Apple and Google - of such small stores if you know where to look.
Since 2001 Michael managed to grow Xendex from zero to a medium size mobile games developer & publisher (at top 75 people large). He won the majority of large mobile games publishers active in the industry's early days as clients and worked with over 120 developers. Successfully restructured the company in the recent years to a global publisher and distributor which it is today. Xendex became the major provider to EA Mobile since 2013 for global markets outside the two big app stores.
Michael also helps games companies in the area of games production, business development and sales and also acts as Associate Partner at i5invest for the games industry.

Panel discussion and more @ VR Playful Art Friday

Alen Ladavac is leading the technology team as well as working on all aspects of Croteam games since 1993. Now mainly leading the efforts on Serious Sam 4 development, but also tinkering with VR games, Mixed Reality and Serious Sam VR. His previous work includes the world-famous Serious Sam franchise and critically acclaimed The Talos Principle. His broad range of interests and experience spans all technical areas of the game development, from rendering, sound and physics, to build systems and content pipelines.

Since his Diploma as Interaction Designer at the Bauhaus Dessau in the year 2009, Tristan Schulze (DE) works as artist, designer, musician and teacher in national and international context. His teaching experience at several German art and design institutions and his working field between art and design since 2008 concluded into his current artistic practice since 2015 in the field of digital media art.
He currently lives together with his family in Leipzig, Germany.

Johanna Pirker is game developer, researcher, and educator, and an active supporter of the local indie developer community. She has long-lasting experience in evaluating, designing, and developing games and virtual realities and believes in them as tools to support learning, collaboration, and to solve real problems At the moment she teaches game development at TU Graz and researches games with focus on HCI, AI, and VR technologies.

Robert Glashüttner is a senior editor at Radio FM4, part of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF, where he is in charge of the game culture department. He is researching on (digital) games as a journalist and in some cases also as an academic for 15 years. Robert is a presenter, consultant and writer for different initiatives and game culture outlets like SUBOTRON, WASD Magazine and Videogame Tourism.

Elisabeth Schlögl studied History of Art at the Karl-Franzens University in Graz and has been working at the Kunsthaus Graz as an Assistant Curator since 2014. She is interested in artistic projects dealing with current social issues. She likes to open up contemporary art discussions with local partners from different directions and create environments that enable a lively, discursive encounter with contemporary art, encouraging participation.

Reni Hofmüller is an artist, musician, composer, performer, organizer and activist in the fields of usage of (new) media, technology and politics in general, engaged in development of contemporary art. She focuses on art in technological contexts and looks into relations between art, technology and society. Since a long time she has been working with sound as her main artistic tool, but with the same sort of interest she will go for a walk or found a new network of people to deepen her connection with her surrounding. She is one of the founders of esc medien kunst labor, has been involved in Radio Helsinki (the local noncommcercial community radio), mur.at, and more.

Registration

The event is free but a registration is required.

VR Playful Art Friday

Friday will be an artsy day. You are invited to experience Virtual Reality (VR) in a public exhibition of VR installations at Kunsthaus Graz, where artists and developers showcase their art in VR.